Latin-American Mythology. Hartley Burr Alexander
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with its seasons and cycles and evident metamorphoses,—reactions which start, apparently, with a dreamy consciousness of the fluid and incoherent character of an outer, man-environing world, and culminate in a sense of the allegory and drama of things physical, and the discovery of a thinking self, still hazy as to its powers and its limitations. The biographic tale is a long one; it begins in savagery and continues on into the highest civilization; it is today unfinished, and so long as man lives and thinks must continue unfinished; but it is not without form, and its continuities become the more obvious with the extension of our knowledge of men.
It should be added that each of the interests which have been named shares in or leads to that final interest which is most appropriate to all, namely, a common concern for human welfare. The missionary interest is obviously actuated by this from the very beginning, and, as applied to America, it has produced (in Las Casas and his many notable successors) a truly wonderful series of apostolic figures—in themselves a moving revelation of the possibilities of human nature. Hardly less striking is the humanitarianism which has accompanied the aesthetic interest—one need but mention Montaigne's sympathetic curiosity, Rousseau, fantastic in his eighteenth century credulity, Chateaubriand, with his "epic of the man of nature," or Fenimore Cooper's idealization of the savage chivalrous,—while the curiosity of the anthropologist and the philosopher, as must all honest curiosity about things human, leads at the last to understanding and sympathy, and ultimately to an active desire to preserve the manifest good which enlightens every chapter in the narrative of human progress.
Finally, it is perhaps worth observing that America affords a field of truly unique profit for all of these interests. The long isolation of its inhabitants from the balance of mankind, the variety of the forms and levels of their native achievement, the intrinsic value to humanity at large of what they did achieve, both in material and ideal modes, all unite to give to the races of the New Hemisphere an almost other-world distinction from the Old World peoples from whose midst (in some remote day) they doubtless sprang. It is true that the resemblances between the modes of life and the bent of thought in the two Worlds are as striking and numerous as their divergences; but this fact is in itself of the highest significance in that it emphasizes that fundamental unity, spiritual as well as physical, which is of the whole human brotherhood.
It is surely apparent that one book cannot satisfy all the interests which have been here defined. It is possible, however, that a description which should show what, in the main, are the materials to be found and how they are distributed with reference to accessible sources of study might well contribute to all. Nothing more ambitious than this is in the plan of the present work.
CHAPTER I
THE ANTILLES
I. THE ISLANDERS6
A glance at a map of the Western Hemisphere reveals two great continents, North and South America, somewhat tenuously united by the Isthmus and the Antilles. The Isthmus is solid, mountainous land, forming a part of that backbone of the hemisphere which extends along its western border, continuous from Alaska to the Land of Fire. The Antilles are an archipelago, or rather a group of archipelagos, extending without gap from the tip of Florida to Trinidad and the mouths of the Orinoco. Both connexions have a certain weight, or leaning, toward North America. The Isthmus narrows southward almost to the point of its attachment to South America, while to the north it broadens out into Central America, the peninsula of Yucatan, and the plateau of Mexico. Similarly, the southern division of the archipelago, the Lesser Antilles, forms an arc of islets, mere stepping-stones, as it were, from the southern continent to the large islands of the Greater Antilles—Porto Rico, Hispaniola or Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba—which are natural outliers of the continent to the north. Cuba, indeed, almost unites Yucatan and Florida; while breasting Cuba and Florida, toward the open sea, is a third island group, the Bahamas, still further emphasizing the northern predominance.
There is a superficial resemblance between the connexions of the northern and southern land bodies in the Old World and in the New—the Isthmus of Suez having its counterpart in Panama; the peninsulas and large islands of southern Europe corresponding to Florida, Yucatan, and the Greater Antilles; and the break at Gibraltar suggesting the uncertain bridge of the Lesser Antilles. But the resemblance is merely superficial. The Mediterranean served far more as a unifier than as a divider of cultures and civilizations in antiquity; all its shores were in a sense a single land even before Rome united them politically. The Caribbean, on the other hand, was a true obstacle to the primitive intercourse of the western continents, having its proper Old World analogue in the Sahara Desert rather than in the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, we can carry this truer analogy a step further, pointing out that just as Old World culture went southward, from Egypt into Ethiopia, by way of the comparatively secure route of the Nile, so New World civilization found its securest path by way of the solid land of the Isthmus, while the islets of the Lesser Antilles and the isle-like oases of the Sahara were alike unfriendly to profoundly influential intercourse.
In one striking particular the analogies of the Old World are reversed in the New: at least in recent periods, the migration of native races and culture has been from the south to the north. This is the more extraordinary in view of the land predominance which, as has been indicated, belongs to the north. The Isthmus was held by, and is now representative of, the Chibchan stock, extending far south into Ecuador; while the Antilles, at the time of the discovery, were almost entirely possessed by tribes of two great South American stocks, Arawakan and Carib. In Cuba, and probably in the Bahamas, there were remnants of more ancient peoples—timid and crude folk, whose kindred seem to have been the makers of the shell-mounds of Florida, and whose provenience was doubtless the northern continent; but neither the race nor the affinities of these vanished peoples is certainly known; even in pre-Columbian times they were succumbing to the war-like Calusa of southern Florida and to the still more dangerous Arawakan tribes from the south.
Of the two powerful races from the south, the first comers were doubtless the Taïno7 (as the Antillean Arawak are named), whom the Spaniards found in possession of most of Cuba and of the other greater islands, Porto Rico alone showing a strong Carib element along with the Arawak. The Lesser Antilles, bordering the sea which was named for their race, was inhabited by Carib tribes, whose language comprised a man-tongue and a woman-tongue, the latter containing many Arawak words—a fact which has led to the interesting (though uncertain) inference that the first Carib invaders slew all the warriors of their Arawak predecessors, taking the women for their own wives. Only when they came to Porto Rico, the first of the Greater Antilles in their route, were they partially stopped by the mass and strength of the more highly developed Taïno peoples; some, indeed, obtained a foothold here, while beyond, in Hispaniola, one of the five caciques8 dividing the power of the island was reputed a Carib, and in Cuba itself have been found bones believed to be those of Carib marauders. The typical culture of the Antilles, that of the Arawakan Taïno, was scarcely less aggressive than the Carib. Arawaks gained a foothold in Florida, and their influence, in trade at least, seems to have extended far into Muskhogean territories to the north, while it may have affected Yucatan and Honduras to the west. Nor was it meanly savage in type. The Antilles furnish every incentive of climate, food supply, rich resources, and easy communication for development of civilization; and at the time of the discovery of the Taïno peoples, they were already advanced in the arts of agriculture, pottery-making, weaving, and stone-working, combined with some knowledge of metals. Furthermore, they had developed their social organization to such an extent that their chiefs, or caciques, with power in some cases hereditary, were the heads of veritable nations—all of Jamaica was under one ruler, Hispaniola had five, while the Ciboney of Cuba and the Borinqueño of Porto Rico were powerful peoples. The Spanish conquerors of the islands succeeded early in virtually annihilating these nations, but their handiwork and the traditions which they have left still command respect.